Due to recent legal updates and changes regarding medical marijuana laws in the State of Illinois, the Village of Lincolnwood’s Community Development department was looking for a way to be very clear about how these regulations would affect businesses in the community. They approached the villge’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) department to create maps that took into consideration all of the regulations used to regulate location of both dispensaries and cultivation centers. This was done in an effort to get a better understanding of which areas within the village could be potential sites for these businesses to operate.

GIS was able to use the existing community zoning and school data, in conjunction with data from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, to create buffers at the varying distances of restricted zones stated in the law for both dispensaries and cultivation centers. These buffers were then combined and overlaid with village property line data to highlight lots that could conceivably operate a business based on the current regulations. These maps allowed village staff to be better prepared to deal with and answer questions from potential applicants, as well as present a very clear image to the village board about what areas within the village have the potential for dispensaries and cultivation centers to operate in the future.

The Village of Northbrook has recently launched the MapOffice Web Access tool called Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence is a tool that allows users to filter and display live data from community or custom databases.

Three attributes of Business Intelligence, filtering, visualization, and live data, make it a very powerful tool. Business Intelligence allows users to visualize data on a map by plotting that data by address or XY coordinates. Many times, community databases or software do not have great ways to display the wealth of data they hold. Business Intelligence helps solve this problem by connecting to those databases and displaying the data on MapOffice so users can gain further incite about the data or look for trends.

When looking for trends it is sometimes necessary to manipulate how you view the data. Business Intelligence permits the user to filter the data by date and/or a field within the data. For example, Northbrook has set up a connection to a custom home foreclosure database that allows users to filter foreclosures by date and the foreclosure status. Now the user can narrow the data that is displayed to show only what they are interested in.

Finally, Business Intelligence offers live connections to the databases. This can be extremely powerful as users can view and analyze data held in the database as it is updated without having to wait for data to be uploaded to MapOffice.

The Village of Northbrook looks forward to taking advantage of this useful and powerful tool by connecting to community databases and software such as FireHouse, an ERP system, and many others to come.